I was just reading Owen Gingrich’s fascinating The Book Nobody Read (Penguin) this morning while having hot-cakes with my family for breakfast. Gingrich, an astronomer and historian of science, writes in this elegantly styled, 310 pages book, about his adventures tracking down extant copies of the first two editions of Copernicus’ De revolutionibus–the book that originally set out the mathematics behind our modern conception of the solar system. On page 64, in an almost off-hand manner, Gingrich says, in part,
“…Having by then [1973] examined more than a hundred copies, surely sufficient for statistical purposes, I was tempted to say that enough was enough. Nevertheless, Rome beckoned, because I knew there were more unexamined Copernicus imprints in that metropolis than in any other single place. Copies were found in the Biblioteca Nazionale, in the Accademia dei Lincei, at the Vatican, and in the Biblioteca Casanatense. The latter library, named after Cardinal Casanate, who later became head of the Inquisition that had sentenced Giordano Bruno to the stake in 1600, unexpectedly turned out to have Bruno’s De revolutionibus, a second edition. Bruno had been sentenced as a heretic for a plethora of heterodox ideas, including the plurality of worlds, but he seemed at best rather ill informed about Copernicus’ ideas. His De revolutionibus contained a bold signature but no evidence that he had actually read the book….”
The Mechanical Turk; the True Story Of the Mysterious Chess Playing Machine that Gripped the World.
by Tom Standage.
Penguin. 274 pages.
I used to be a chess fan until Big Blue, by sheer number-crunching power and limitless endurance wore down the greatest living chess player, Garry Kasparov, and pre-empted the game for me. Bobby Fischer’s Anti-Semitism and ever-increasing creep-quotient (or Creep-Q, which now towers well beyond whatever I.Q. the fabled payer is rumored to possess) did not help matters either.
This book, however, gives back a little of that old magic to a subject that is now “human, all too human.” The Mechanical Turk traces the history of one of the most fascinating automatons of the 19th century. This machine was the inspiration for Edgar Allan Poe’s pioneering foray into rational detection (yet Standage points out that Poe might have cribbed his expose of the Turk from an earlier pamphlet), and for Ambrose Bierce’s “Moxon’s Master.” These are the two sources that first introduced me to “Maelzel’s Chess Player” as he was known to Poe and other 19th century Americans.
But the history of this celebrated hoax goes back much earlier to the 18th century. Standage introduces us to the Vienese genius Wolfgang von Kempelen, who created the machine as an answer to a supercillious French magician, who attempted to condescend to Queen Maria Theresa’s court while explaining the intricacies of magnetism. Von Kempelen declaired that he would produce a machine that would become the wonder of the age, far outstripping anything mere French magicians could produce, and he was quite correct. Later, he distanced himself from his creation, but after his death it assumed a life of its own, and, under various handlers, it toured Europe and America, playing–and winning– against such luminaries as Napoleon, Frederick the Great, and Benjamin Franklin. It also lost to real chess luminaries such as Philidor, but, inexlicably, it also lost to average joe schmoes from chess clubs across the globe.
Of course it was a hoax. Many people suspected this to be the case, but Standage gives us the cultural background to the Turk’s odd fame, sketching brief histories of the celebrated automaton maker Vaucanson and his amazing “mechanical duck”–also something of a hoax–and other creators of pre-robots, and this allows us to understand why what appears little more than a crude toy to 21st century eyes grown dim from too much staring into computer screens, would inspire the likes of Charles Babbage to begin the long road to automation, the creation of computers and artificial intelligence, and the eventual defeat of Garry Kasparov, which explains my sadness every time I look at a chess board. I shudder at the thought of other human activities being pre-empted and “shut out” by robot Mozarts and Beethovens or da Vincis,or Shakespeares or Alice Walkers,or Michael Jordans or Joe DiMaggios–all of which is scheduled to happen within the next 50 years or so. I can’t wait.
Japan has two major holidays every year: New Years and Obon. Of the two, I find Obon the most interesting because it’s a kind of religious halloween that takes place in late July and early August. The ancestors of each family are thought to come back and live with their kin for a few days and to dance with them at the annual round dances called Obon Odori. The Japanese also celebrate this time of year by telling ghost stories–thought to stave off the heat by inspiring chills along the spine. Yotsuya Kaiden–the story of the blameless housewife Oiwa poisoned and eventually murdered by her heartless husband–runs at the Kabuki Theater in Tokyo and can be seen in its various manifestations on late-night T.V. Variety shows feature ghost pictures sent in by viewers at home, and the whole country becomes interested in “annoyo”–the other world. I spent many years living in the countryside in Kyushu–where the nights are darker and the feeling of the past is ever-present. That’s where one feels the presence of annoyo and the significance of Obon the most! But, like most other things in Japan, the real secret of Obon is the people. Obon odori time is a great social occasion when all the pretty girls come out in their summer kimono and grandmothers teach their grandchildren the particular steps and hand-positions of their village dance style. There’s nothing too spooky about the celebration itself. Department stores, too, feature Bon lamps–blue-colored lava-lamp sorts of things, some with revolving blue lights–that are meant to show the way for returning spirits.
Here’s a “true” Obon story that I’d like to share.
I’ve lived in Japan now for over 14 years and I can tell you that Japan is full of interesting ghost stories, many of which I have collected over the years. Every summer, during Obon (Japan’s equivalent of Halloween), I make a point of asking my students to share their stories as part of my English classes. Just recently I gave the assignment to one of my English classes at Waseda University and received the following most interesting story: The mother of one of my students had a disturbing, recurring dream. She dreamed that her late father was standing next to her futon weeping uncontrollably. When she asked what was wrong he wouldn’t answer. The woman said that he was dressed in his white burial shroud, and looked exactly as he did in life, except that he had no legs–a traditional characteristic of Japanese ghosts. After a week of these dreams, the woman attempted to rise up and touch her father. “Don’t come here!” He told her. “I don’t want you here!” The woman found the harsh language that her father used odd indeed. In the final dream, the father reached down and touched his daughter on the breast and disappeared. When the woman woke up she felt that the dreams and her father’s touch had some special significance. Later that day she went to the hospital and had her breasts examined and the doctor found a tiny cancer. The doctor was astonished because the cancer was so small no one would have noticed it except for another specialist. The woman had an operation and is now perfectly healthy. She thinks, or so her son told the class, that her father did not want her to go to “Annoyo”–the other world, or the land of the dead–where he was. That’s why he told her not to come near him, and touched her breast. The incident happened about ten years ago, and is told by the family every year at Obon.
Wings of Madness; Alberto Santos-Dumont and the Invention of Flight.
Pul Hoffman.
Harper Perennial. 372 pages.
When I was an undergraduate I used to enjoy going through the back issues of the old Century Magazine. Century was a clearing house for the whole intellectual and cultural complex of Anglo-Saxon Victorian life. Most fascinating for me were the illustrations of the marvels of the world, including the wonders of developing technology. It is in the pages of Century Magazine that I first ran across the famous picture of Tesla calmly sitting among the crash and thunder of the artifical lightning he’d generated through one of his massive coils; and it was in Century that I first saw the diminuative Alberto Santos-Dumont, sitting beneath the huge envelope of airship no. 6 on his way to circle the Eiffel Tower.
Santoas-Dumont is a kind of dead-end in the history of modern flight. Though he was hailed as a great inventor and a pioneer of the air in his time, he was soon surpassed by the Wrights, the Curtises and the hundreds of others that followed. But for a time–between 1898 and 1906–Santos-Dumont was the subject of the adoration of the masses. Children played with toy Santos-Dumont airships, and Parisian women wore Santos-Dumont hats. He was photographed, lionized, feted by Kings, and secretly lusted after by many fair ladies, but he remained remote, self-contained, beyond it all. Indeed this brave man, who looked death squarely in the face and knew just what to do when the gas expanded too much in the warm upper reaches of the air and burst the silken envelope of his balloon, or when tumbling 100 feet to the earth trapped in the wreckage of his Demoiselle monoplane, was by all accounts Gay. Just as Tesla and other Gay men and women of the time, Santos-Dumont chose to maintain an ambiguous personal life.
However, his style of dress–he was the first civilian male to wear a wrist watch, for instance–his bravery, and the boldness of his designs attracted the admiration of thousands, including Thomas Edison, Tesla, Alexander Graham Bell, and James Pierpont Langley–the director of the Smithsonian and the inventor of a failed monoplane.
Who dared say that man had not yet tamed the air ways by 1903? Santos-Dumont, the diminuative, independently wealthy Brazilian, already had in his airship no. 9–the personal airship that he used to fly about Paris in, stopping at his favorite bars for a drink, or dining at Maxim’s with his friends, while the doorman held the mooring rope outside!
No doubt Santos-Dumont was a genius, but a genius prone to depression and inexplicable acts of self-abnegation. Though he was the first person to fly in Europe, he soon recognized that the Wrights had flown earlier and in a better designed version of a heavier-than-air craft. After that he began to live alone and sometimes to check himsef into mental hospitals where he refused to see family and friends. World War I convinced him that the world had perverted “his” invention–which he had intended only as a defensive weapon, if a weapon at all. Finally, in 1932, the former hero of the air hung himself.
Santos-Dumont loved turn-of-the-century Paris and there he flew above the heads of Picasso and Gertrude Stein, Alfred Jarry and Jack Johnson. That time is as distant to us as the Pre-Cambrian, and, like the Pre-Cambrian filled with fantastic forms of life that come down to us in old images and in the fossils of thoughts–the pages of books. Some continue to speak to us, while some remain as a foot-note at the very bottom of a crumbling page. Paul Hoffman rescues Santos Dumont for English readers, and gives him to us decked out in superb sentences and finely tailored paragraphs. In Brazil, however, the intrepid aeronaut has never been forgotten and to this day one may see his heart at the air-force academy in Campo dos Afonsos, on the outskirts of Rio.
When the Mississippi Ran Backwards; Empire, Intrigue, Murder and the New Madrid Earthquakes
by Jay Feldman.
Free Press. 308 Pages.
Well, speaking of earthquakes…this is one book that I’ve meant to review for quite a while and now, with a typhoon set to arrive at any moment, we’ll begin.
Jay Feldman has written a fascinating study of the New Madrid earthquakes of 1811–1812 which takes us through the politics of Native-American removal, the advance of the industrial revolution, internationsl politics, the horrors of slavery, the science of geology, the physics behind it, and all points in between. Not only does he give us a look at first-hand accounts of the tragedy itself–in which a series of quakes (some of which would have measured a mind-boggling 8 or higher on the Richter scale!) refashioned several hundred miles of the American frontier, and explains in a cogent fashion the arcana of seismology so that a layman can understand exactly what happened; but he gives us four focci through which we see how the quakes impinged on society, impelling savants, scoundrels and even seers to their peculiar destinies. He deftly interweaves the stories of Tecumsah, the gifted orator who attempted to set up a pan-tribal league to oust white domination of North America; the first riverboat, built and piloted by Theordore Roosevelt’s great uncle; the grisly death of a slave at the hands of Thomas Jefferson’s nephews and the consequent frontier justice; and the career of a scoundrel who plotted against American shipping interests, yet still managed to attain high distinction in the military, and was not found out until after his death. Each of these turbulent stories happened at the same time and reached their crises and denouements as Nature turned herself upside down and islands disappeared, new lakes fashioned themselves in front of disbelieving eyes, columns of water and sand blew into the air and wild birds were so frightened that they alighted on the arms of astonished on-lookers.
Feldman is in complete command of his sources, and recounts the various stories in a gripping manner. It’s rare for a book of history to be a page-turner, but this one certainly is.
I guess the saga of Nicholas Roosevelt and his wife Lydia gripped my imagination the most. Nicholas designed and built the New Orleans, the first steam-boat to navigate the Mississippi. As fate would have it, Nicholas unwittingly chose the year of the quakes to test the New Orleans against the potentially murderous waters of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. As anyone who’s ever read Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi knows, the river was filled with perils for those who were fortunate enough to captain river boats in more cultivated times; but can you imagine navigating the “American Nile” for the first time ever? In addition, Roosevelt’s wife insisted on coming along, even though she was due to give birth during the trip. Roosevelt’s little girl was also with them as well as the family dog. Moreover, the Mississippi was the haunt of river pirates, the war-gound of Native-Americans, and the catch-all for all manner of rough and tumble individuals who lived comfortably outside the reach of the law. But the crowning danger was the night that the Mississippi did indeed flow backwards! Did the Roosevelts and their ship survive?
Straightening up the apartment, I noticed something rather odd and interesting: certain book-cases did not move at all and hardly any of the books were disturbed, while the cases in my front office toppled. Also, certain stacks of papers (yep, I have them!) and Cd’s shifted, while others sitting within a few feet of them were untouched. This leads me to believe that the quake went “through” our apartment complex at an angle.
According to Kevin Wood’s paper (the Yomiuri) for Sunday, July 24, 2005, the quake was a 6.0 on the Richter scale. According to the Modified Mercalli Intensity Scale With Magnitude Equivalents, that would have given us an intensity of a high 7 to low 8 and a description that ranges from: “Felt by all, many frightened and run outside. Some heavy furniture moved…” to “…Damage slight in specially designed structures, considerable damage in ordinary substantial buildings with partial collapse….”
So far we haven’t felt any aftershocks.
There were a few minor injuries (thank God), and a few minor problems with buildings and outdoor structures, but most of the newer structures have been built to ride out lower-scale earthquakes.
Today began like just about any Saturday morning in Shin-Urayasu, Japan: breakfast, the morning paper, CNN. We did have a little surprise at about 10 a.m.–the arrival–by special delivery–of 10 stag beetles in a terrarium, complete with pine resin jello (their perfect food)–courtesy of an uncle in Sendai. We set the beetles up in their new home and they went about the business that makes them beloved of Japanese children everywhere, including mine: they began to duel with the special hooked horns on their noses. The Japanese call them “Kabuto Mushi” which means armored bugs, and kids (and many adults) set up matches between particularly “genki” (spirited) candidates. Perhaps because ours are wild stag beetles and not the hot-house grown beetles that are sold in the departments stores for prices ranging from $5.00 to $50.00, they are particularly spirited. (Right now I hear them blurting their wings and making the sound of tiny knitting needles as they charge across the mulch in their cage and tap their horns together. When one succeeds in flipping the other on its back, a neat little trick that they do by instinct, the match is officially over. My wife says that the matches last all night, as these are nocturnal bugs, and grow more active as the night progresses, so I should be prepared.) For whatever reason it has been decided that the cage should be kept in the hall by my office door and during one of my peregrinations, my foot accidently bumped the cage. The beetles momentarily stopped what they were doing, and then proceeded.
As did our routine. In the late afternoon, my wife and kids went to a birthday party, and I went to work out at the gymn. It was around 4:50 P.M., as I was pedalling my way to exhaustion on an exercise bike, that it felt as if a giant hammer had hit the side of the building, propelling us all forward in the direction of the far wall. Women screamed, lights flickered, I pulled myself back to an upright position and looked around. I was awed by the raw force of what had just happened, and was equally awed by the fact that it hit without warning–without affording me time to think, only time to react. The only other situation in which I felt such force was when I was back-ended by a sports car on New Years eve, 1979, on a sleet-slick highway leading from Reisterstown, Maryland to the Beltway.
The Japanese around me shook their heads as the television superimposed the information across the day’s sumo matches that our section of Chiba Prefecture was located exacly at the epicenter of the quake. Its strength was estimated as 5.7.
My first thought was for my family, then for the apartment–particularly for the large water tank with my hapless gold fish inside it. A phone call assured me that my family was ok, so I hurried back to the apartment, fearing the worst. Interestingly enough the Japanese are pretty nonchalant about earthquakes. “This is Japan,” one teacher told me with a grin, “and we take these sorts of things in stride.” I bowed and wished him a safe trip back, hopped on my bike and returned to find my large book case toppled over in my office and lots of water from the tank slopped on the floor, but the fish unhurt. And so were the beetles, by the way, who no doubt thought that someone had accidentally kicked their cage again.
Experts predict that the next great Tokyo Earthquake is due at any time.
In the simple operations of nature many wonderful things are wrought, which, upon a superficial view appear impossible, or else to be the work of the devil. These certainly ought to be considered in a far different light from magical performances, and should be classed among the surprising phenomenae of nature. Thus lamps or torches made of serpents’ skins, and compounded of the fat and spirit of vipers, when lighted in a dark room, will, bring the similitude of snakes or serpents writhing and twisting down the walls. So oil compounded of grapes, being put into a lamp, and lighted, will make the room appear to be full of grapes, though in reality it is nothing more than the idea or similitude.–The same thing is to be done with all the plants and flowers throughout the vegetable system, by means of a chemical analysis, whereby a simple spirit is produced, which will represent the herb or flower from which it is extracted, in full bloom. And, as the process is easy, simple, pleasing, and curious, I will here state it in such a manner as might enable any person to put it in practice at pleasure.
Take any whole herb, or flower, with its root, make it very clean, and bruise it in a stone mortar quite small; then put it into a glass vessel hermetically sealed; but be sure the vessel be two parts in three empty: then place it for putrefaction in a gentle heat in balneo, not more than blood warm, for six months, by which it will be all resolved into water. Take this water, and pour it into a glass retort, and place a receiver thereunto, the joints of which must be well closed; distil it in a sand heat until there comes forth a water and an oil; and in the upper part of the vessel will hang a volatile salt. Separate the oil from the water, and keep it by itself, but with the water purify the volatile salt by dissolving, filtering, and coagulating. When the salt is thus purified, imbibe with it the said oil, until it is well combined. Then digest them well together for a month in a vessel hermetically sealed; and by this means will be obtained a most subtil essence, which, being held over a gentle heat of a candle, the spirit will fly up into the glass where it is confined, and represent the perfect idea or similitude of that vegetable whereof it is the essence: and in this manner will that thin substance, which is like impalpable ashes or salt, send forth from the bottom of the glass the manifest form of whatever herb it is the menstruum, in perfect vegetation, growing little by little, and putting on so fully the form of stalks, leaves, and flowers, in full and perfect appearance, that anyone would believe the same to be natural and corporeal: though at the same time it is nothing more than the spiritual idea endued with a spiritual essence. This shadowed figure as soon as the vessel is taken from the heat or candle, returns to its caput mortuum, or ashes again, and vanishes away like an apparition, becoming a chaos or confused matter.
From Book 4. Online at Twilight Grotto–Esoteric Archives.
How The Irish Saved Civilization.
Thomas Cahill.
Doubleday. Paperback. 250 Pages.
This is a passionately written look at the dark ages of Western Civilization, when the barbarians were not only at the gate, but had taken over the whole kingdom and all the knowledge we value from the Classical worlds of Greek and Rome was in danger of disappearing. This charming book tells us of the few hearty Celtic Christian monks who spent months huddled together copying the precious manuscripts before dispersing to the four corners of Europe (and as the author briefly contends–even to the New World) carrying their precious cargo with them.
Cahill presents a convincing picture of the break-up of the Roman world, and, without so much as naming America, and Bush, and the rest, points out some sad similarities that may bring our modern world tumbling about our ears.
Cahill explores the nature of the Irish as reflected in their art and literature, and in so doing pointed me in the direction of a real treasure: Thomas Kinsella’s translation of the old Irish epic of the Tain, which we will consider at a later date. In addition to the epic, Cahill introuduces us to fierce lines of Dark Eileen O’Connell’s “Lament for Art O’Leary” as well as these charming verses written by an Irish copyist in the margins of a manuscript:
I and Pangur Ban my cat,
‘Tis a like task we are at:
Hunting mice is his delight,
Hunting words I sit all night.
‘Tis a merry thing to see
At our tasks how glad are we,
When at home we sit and find
Entertainment to our mind.
`Gainst the wall he sets his eye,
Full and fierce and sharp and sly;
`Gainst the wall of knowledge I
All my little wisdom try.
So in peace our task we ply,
Pangur Ban my cat and I;
In our arts we find our bliss,
I have mine and he has his.
This book, moreover, is filled with treasures in the form of new takes on old subjects. For instance, Cahill points out that one of the nightmarish Celtic gods (whose hideousness is only surpassed by the Mexican Coatlicue), is in a state of sexual excitement while in the midst of devouring the arm of a human sacrifice. I’d never noticed that before.
Cahill wears his learning lightly. He sends us back to Plato, Augustine, Virgil, and others with a new appreciation, and he allows us to examine the intricate script of the illuminated manuscript books with an eye steeped in the glitter and the darkness of Celtic culture. A fine book to take with you on the train. Cahill is not Gibbon, but perhaps he is just right for our times.
For Samuel Beckett.
Morton Feldman.
Kammerensemble Nue Musik Berlin,
Roland King, conducting.
This piece presents a solid wall of noise–((like a steam-powered garment factory of sound working intricate cycles in a windowless, cement-floored building–(like a Tinguely self-destroying sculpture that does not manage to self-destruct, but instead grinds to a halt when the momentum it builds up is suddenly shunted off to power some other impossible, pataphysical machine beyond the range of our hearing, but which causes the dogs to prick their ears and to howl up and down the block)))–which we cannot pierce. We are swept up in the movements of this sonic process, and it is fascinating, challenging, but it is not pleasant. In fact, this is some of the least restful music I have encountered. Oddly enough, though this piece resembles “In Coptic Light” I found the latter to be of more interest, because it was somehow “softer”. Perhaps it’s the interpretation of this ensemble, but the total effect is one that I have no wish to repeat often.
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